Nurse of the Week: Seattle Nurse Karin Huster Says Battling Ebola Outbreaks in Africa Is “The Best Job in the World”

Our Nurse of the Week is Karin
Huster, a Seattle-based nurse and field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders.
Huster spends six to 12 weeks at a time away from home, helping the world’s
most vulnerable populations. Most recently she was in the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC) helping battle Ebola outbreaks.

Even though she regularly encounters dying patients, Huster tells seattletimes.com, “It’s the best job in the world. And I don’t mean this lightly…My goal in life is nothing else but to try to improve people’s lives.”

Ebola has killed over 2,000
individuals and sickened almost 3,000 individuals in the DRC since August 2018.
The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global health emergency
in July 2019 while Huster was on her fourth trip there.

Helping those in need has been
Huster’s dream since she was a child. She grew up on Réunion
Island, a French island in the Indian Ocean, and in 1991 she moved to Seattle
for a job translating English to French for Microsoft. Feeling unfulfilled, she
left her job at Microsoft to enroll in nursing school at the University of
Washington (UW). She spent eight years as a nurse in the intensive care unit at
Harborview Medical Center before going back to UW to earn her master’s degree
in global health. In 2012, Huster went to Lebanon on a trip with UW to work
with Syrian refugees. It was there that she found her passion for traveling to
help the world’s most vulnerable populations.

To
learn more about Karin
Huster, a Seattle-based nurse and field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders
who considers her job battling Ebola outbreaks in Africa the “best job in the
world,” visit here.